Table of Contents
  1. Intro
  2. Marie's Podcast
  3. Not a premium subscriber? You're missing out!
  4. News about Google’s Algorithms
  5. MHC Announcements
  6. Google Announcements
  7. Other Interesting News
  8. Local SEO
  9. What I'm reading this week
  10. SEO Jobs
  11. Want More?
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SNYCU Ep. 254 - September 29, 2022

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The September core and product reviews updates have finished rolling out. And following that we have seen significant SERP turbulence. Google’s Search On event happened this week and I’m incredibly excited about the upcoming changes to search.

New starting with this episode: I’ve changed Recommended Reading  to What Marie’s reading. Premium readers get my summary of the articles I’m reading this week along with some extra thoughts.

Marie's Podcast

SEO is changing so much! In this episode Marie shares what SEOs can learn from Google’s Search On 2022 event. Is Google going to replace Amazon as the place where people go to buy online? Google announced many changes coming to shopping. Many of the upcoming changes to search are going to make the life of SEOs difficult. If you want to stay on top of these changes, listen to Marie’s thoughts on how search is changing and how we can keep up.

Note, I had to record this podcast late at night as I’ve been so busy so it’s a little bit dark.

Not a premium subscriber? You're missing out!

It’s well worth the $18 per month. Want to see a sample premium newsletter episode? View it here.

The following topics are covered in the premium version of this episode:

  • New featured snippets with bolded info that’s not on the page
  • Google cookbook
  • Can a page with lots of ads rank?
  • How to decide whether to clean up old redirects
  • How can you tell if content is expertly written?
  • How to know when to update old content
  • Super helpful GSC notifications
  • Does a link on a no indexed page pass PageRank?
  • Is there a penalty for keyword stuffed urls?
  • Google’s advice for meta tags
  • Tips for creating content briefs
  • A lesson in intent
  • Inspiring story about making money with an affiliate site
  • Getting started with python for SEO
  • Do rank tracking tools have SafeSearch on or off?
  • New template for free for SEO site audits
  • Tool to test if text is AI or human written
  • Free rank tracker based on GSC results
  • What I’m reading this week – Marie’s summary and thoughts on the articles she is reading this week
You’ll also have access to all past episodes, including this one.
I

News about Google’s Algorithms

This week I’m putting all of the algo update section into the light version of newsletter. Because of the overlapping algo updates, there is a lot of confusion! Hopefully this recap helps.

My thoughts on Search On 2022: We need to pay attention to what Google is doing

Search On is the annual event where Google shares what new innovations they are bringing our way. This event had so much in it that it will be hard to summarize it all for newsletter. Here’s a thread that explains all of the relevant information. 

A lot of this, on the surface sounds like it’s not that important. But I think there are some HUGE changes coming. 

We have talked about multisearch before. In the event, a woman took a picture of her bagel, searched using that image as her search query and then added the word “purse” to her search. And Google showed her sites that sold purses that look like bagels for her to purchase. I’m not kidding.

Soon, if you start your search with the word “shop”, like, “shop womens bomber jacket” Google will show you a stream of places you can buy that product. You’ll also get options to refine your search to a certain type of look, a certain brand, trending products and so on. 

If you’re a merchant, Google’s got new technology that will allow you to submit a few pictures and they’ll display a 3d version of your product.

People who search for products will be shown buying guides with information that people want to know when buying that product. And you’ll be able to tap on that product and instantly see important information like the pros and cons of that product.

I personally believe that Google has a plan to overtake Amazon as the number one place people go to when they want to buy products online. Amazon has a leg up because they’ve figured out shipping logistics. But people, myself included, are getting really frustrated with bad service, faulty products and other problems. If Google can convince people to change how they search online, we may find that most people default to searching with Google, perhaps Google Lens, finding sites that sell this product and then purchasing directly. No wonder Google has been so loud this year about having us improve product pages, product review pages and image use. I also think E-A-T will play a role here. Google likely knows which merchants to recommend because of E-A-T.

Google also talked extensively about Google maps changes that allow people to search in real time and explore. 

Prabhakar Raghavan opened this event by asking us what we thought of when we thought of Google. When most people think Google, they picture the Google homepage with a search bar. He said that Google wants to change our thought on this so that Google is not just a text box to search, but a way to search the world anywhere or any way we want.

As SEOs there is so much to be on top of here. Things are changing rapidly.

Here is the Verge’s article about the Search On event. Their take is that Google is reinventing search to be more visual and interactive than ever.

 

The latest on the September core update

I have not yet deeply analyzed sites hit by the September core update, but wanted to share what I learned from other SEO’s on twitter this week. Thank you very much to Lily Ray who has been looking at Sistrix’s reports of site visibility and sharing insights with us.

The update finished rolling out on September 26. 

What the community is saying so far:

  • News, entertainment and gossip sites were hit hard.
  • Many government sites saw big increases. My thought: Google tells us in their document on how they fight disinformation that in “times of crisis” they will change the algorithm to prefer authoritative sites. I think the world is continuing to be in a state of crisis like we have not seen in our lifetimes.
  • Many sites that did well with the May Core update were hit by the September core, and vice versa.
  • Some people saw content disappear from Google News.
  • Some sites that initially saw big improvements did not have those last.
  • Some of the authoritative health sites saw losses.
  • Many lyric sites saw declines

 

This tweet from Lily Ray helps explain why it is so hard to explain where losses are for sites that are hit. It looks like Google is showing the searcher many different types of content to try and meet their intent.

I find it interesting that so many authoritative sites saw declines. I am wondering if many of them suffered losses because an official government site has been promoted above them for many queries.

Here is Mordy Oberstein’s early analysis of the September core update:

What I took from this article:

  • September core was less volatile than the May core update. I find this interesting as I see more movement with this update amongst the sites I monitor.
  • In the May core update travel and real estate were the most volatile. In this update, they were the quietest.
  • The most volatile niches were online communities, hobbies and leisure, pets and animals, beauty and fitness and games.

Possible group sessions to discuss core update hits?

I will be digging into our analytics data later on this month and hopefully will have more to share. I have had many people reach out wanting to chat about why their site may have seen losses with recent updates. While I’ve taken on some of these sites as new clients for site reviews, I keep thinking there is a better way to do this that can help more people and also help me do more analysis to learn more about these updates. 

I’m considering testing offering some group calls where several of us share the changes seen at the time of the core update and brainstorm together on what improvements can be made to hopefully improve with a future core update.

If you are interested in these, please do reach out.

The latest on the September product reviews update rollout

The product reviews update also finished rolling out on September 26, 2022. And on September 27, 2022 the Semrush sensor and other tools reported widespread SERP turbulence. If you saw changes, Google’s advice is that the product reviews update really only should affect sites with product review content. If you don’t have that type of content, it’s more likely the core update that affected you. If you do have review content, it’s likely that content that needs attention.

Thank you to Glenn Gabe for giving us so much insight into sites affected by this update.

The latest on the helpful content update

I can’t stop thinking about the helpful content update. (I know…that’s not normal, right?). It bothers me that Google asked to talk to me about this update, pumped it up as a really big deal, and then when it rolled out it looked like just a few super spammy sites were hit. 

Was the HCU a dud? 

You may find Olaf Kopp’s opinion on the helpful content update…helpful. He postulates on whether the helpful content update was just a well planned PR campaign on Google’s part. I personally think the helpful content update laid the foundation for new ways for Google to detect site quality. I think we saw minimal impact initially other than some large sites with boatloads of unhelpful content, but I think we’ll see that Google uses this helpful content classifier in new ways as their machine learning algorithms continue to learn.

I enjoyed this article by Chris Long from GoFish Digital on the helpful content update. He feels that Google is firing a warning shot to sites that have used scaled content strategies using autogenerated content. Chris referred to this Bill Slawski article on Ranking search results based information gain scores. In this patent, Google talks about how they look for similar information within multiple documents and potentially reward documents that provide content that the user isn’t likely to have seen before. Chris postulates that we can make our content more helpful by providing perspectives that haven’t been written about before.

I still think the HCU is a huge deal. We know Google introduced a new classifier with this update and that this classifier uses machine learning. Google says in their documentation, “Over the coming months, we will also continue refining how the classifier detects unhelpful content and launch further efforts to better reward people-first content.”

I think we are in for a wild ride.

News sites hit strongly with recent Google updates

This Sistrix article shows some graphs of serious traffic visibility losses in conjunction with the product reviews update released September 20, 2022. 

It was interesting to note that for some sites, English content took a big hit in countries where the primary language is not English. This makes sense as Google told us the PRU will affect English language product reviews:

As Barry Adams noted, many large newspaper sites saw big drops in visibility around the time of the product reviews update. Dailymail.co.uk is down 27%, Metro.co.uk is down 40%, and the Mirror, Independent, CNN and other well known sites are suffering. 

 

MHC Announcements

Marie is speaking at the Growth Summit

I’m on the virtual stage October 4, 2022 at 11 am PST. They’ve got me paired up with Brian Dean – The Backlinko guy who sold his content to Semrush. We’re having a discussion about “Navigating Google’s Algorithm”.

This should be an interesting conference! They have not asked me for a presentation so it sounds like this will be an off-the-cuff discussion.

There are some other great talks such as Eli Schwartz and Bernard Huang talking about scaling organic reach and turning readers into customers and Wes Bush and Ryan Kim (Spotify) talking about designing a product that acquires and retains users at scale.

You can snag a free ticket here:

https://www.demandcurve.com/growth-summit/accept?name=Marie

Upcoming SMX Next talk

I’m also working hard on my upcoming SMX next presentation. I’ll be sharing on improving sites based on Google’s recommendations for improving content quality. I’m going to explain how machine learning is likely used to answer many of the questions and give practical examples of what types of content core updates is rewarding these days.

You can register for this virtual event for free.

Google Announcements

Google Announcements

The international targeting tool in GSC is deprecated now

If you had a country enabled in the “country tab” it will be deactivated.

Other Interesting News

Get your tickets for the women in tech conference

How people search for fashion on Google

This was an interesting read.

Getty Images will not sell images created by AI

I have been very interested in watching the world of AI created images expand. 

I have been playing around with several AI image tools and keep getting blown away at how easy it is to create art. Just today they announced that everyone has access to DALL-E.

 

Local SEO

The Kansas bug is fixed

We mentioned last week that many local businesses were wrongly being shown on maps as being located in Kansas.

What I'm reading this week

I’m changing “Recommended reading” to “what I’m reading this week”. These are the articles I summarized for premium readers this week (along with a few of my thoughts):

The biggest mystery of Google’s algorithm: Everything ever said about clicks, CTR and bounce rate
https://searchengineland.com/google-clicks-ctr-bounce-rate-ranking-388049
Chris Silver Smith – September 23, 2022

What SEO Copy Is, and What SEO Copy is Not
https://www.adamriemer.me/what-seo-copy-is-and-what-seo-copy-is-not/
Adam Riemer – September 26, 2022

Google’s latest updates leave no room for low-quality content
https://www.kevin-indig.com/googles-latest-updates/
Kevin Indig – September 26, 2022

How to tell if you’ve been hit by an algorithm update
https://searchengineland.com/algorithm-update-traffic-patterns-387959
Nichola Stott – September 15, 2022

The game no one’s talking about: Internet manipulation is on the rise in India
https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/fake-profile-gaming-imdb-internet-manipulation-india-tricking-search-algorithm-google-knowledge-panels-film-industry-multimedia/article65888975.ece
Prashant Baid – September 16, 2022

Jobs

SEO Jobs

Looking for a new SEO job? SEOjobs.com is a job board curated by real SEOs for SEOs. Take a look at five of the hottest SEO job listing this week (below) and sign up for the weekly job listing email only available at SEOjobs.com.

Want More?

Premium members also get the following:

It’s well worth the $18 per month!

The following topics are covered in the premium version of this episode:

  • New featured snippets with bolded info that’s not on the page
  • Google cookbook
  • Can a page with lots of ads rank?
  • How to decide whether to clean up old redirects
  • How can you tell if content is expertly written?
  • How to know when to update old content
  • Super helpful GSC notifications
  • Does a link on a no indexed page pass PageRank?
  • Is there a penalty for keyword stuffed urls?
  • Google’s advice for meta tags
  • Tips for creating content briefs
  • A lesson in intent
  • Inspiring story about making money with an affiliate site
  • Getting started with python for SEO
  • Do rank tracking tools have SafeSearch on or off?
  • New template for free for SEO site audits
  • Tool to test if text is AI or human written
  • Free rank tracker based on GSC results
  • What I’m reading this week – Marie’s summary and thoughts on the articles she is reading this week
You’ll also have access to all past episodes, including this one.
I

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